When you make the last train in a foreign country..

As you may already know, two of us are in Japan just now with a few friends travelling and we wanted to share a short post dedicated to literally the first eventful thing that occurred.

We were delayed at our stopover in Shanghai before arriving in Japan, so we arrived an hour later and by the time we cleared customs and luggage we were rushing through the airport to catch the last train to our Airbnb destination (we had no idea about anything for this journey; we didn’t know what ticket to buy, what stop it was, what line we had to change at, which platform we had to be at.

It was pretty chaotic.

Tapping onto the extent of what was free wifi at the airport we tried to source some information from our friend that made the journey earlier in the day (we had no success). Eventually, we managed to get one piece of information from him; what line we were going to be on. With only this slither of information, we bought four tickets and just went for it; we literally ran through the barriers and got on the train that we saw people swarming towards. Only to realise that there was no source of wifi on the train; from that point, there was a serious rise in concern..

Trying to scrap together all the information we had, we had to try and puzzle everything together and find our next move (there was a lot of waiting involved for the train screens to intervally loop to English).

After around half an hour of travelling (and lots of confused, anxious and rather lost emotions), we began discussing possibilities of asking for someone’s help but everyone on the train was very much engrossed in their own devices with no realisation of our current situation (which made it all the more difficult to figure out who we should approach).

Following continuous discussion and scanning the train, we encountered two very lucky things.

Luck of the day 1 : I frantically kept searching wifi and finally there was luck. Whoever ‘Eric102’ is.. Thank you for turning on your hotspot and not having a password (deliberate or not, you gave us hope in finding a rough stopping point).

Luck of the day 2 : The American girl working as an English teacher for businesses (sorry we didn’t manage to introduce our names nor note yours or your contact details to thank you but we were rather flustered with the whole situation at hand). You literally saved our entire first journey of trying to travel to our Airbnb; literal lifesaver. We would of been stranded until the next day if we didn’t get guidance from you. So very thankful.

So the whole situation was dissolved and we managed to get it all sorted and so far it has been relatively exciting but you don’t want to read about too much good stuff; it’s all about the troubles and funny gimmicks, so I shall spare the successful details for now!

This is honestly a Short blog post just to show some appreciation for those unsung heroes out there. So once again, thank you and you are greatly appreciated (even if you don’t know you are).

Also.. Proof we’ve actually arrived and we’re not just talking a good talk!